You when I describe a picture / photograph of you that you like.

The specific photo I want to write about is one that was clicked around three year ago, when our entire family took a trip (which we had planned for over one year) at a hill station in southern India — it happened to coincide with my grandmother’s eightieth birthday celebrations and hence this was really a big occasion for the entire family.

This was taken in many late afternoons on the day that light at this time of day turned into that special golden quality which renders Hill country photography so rewarding. It finds me looking down at a valley of remarkable width and depth — paddy terraces tumbling down toward a distant river, the entire tableau animated in a warm amber cast as tinged evening light poured through just enough mist —

To me this photograph is most interesting not as a technical level (my father enjoys taking pictures but has never been very proficient at it), but the quality of the moment captured in this image. I knew he was not taking it, my attention focused entirely on the scene in front of me, and this photograph shows something of a mentally absorbed simple quiet joy — someone open to the enjoyments of a beautiful natural scene instead of DYING for engagement. The image has a quality of unselfconsciousness that posed photographs almost never convey.

The way this photograph makes me feel today is layered, and perhaps a little complicated. One obvious pleasure is a stunning image vis-a-vis an intensely happy memory. But there is also a slightly more somber aspect to it — my grandmother died the following year so that trip was the last time our family inits stretched around her. The shot has thus itself become a tiny — and yet irresistibly valuable — keeper of time, both reminding us of this beautiful place but equally the indivisible inimitability of that moment.